Double Dragon II Review: Wander of the Dragons is beyond bad

Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons

The nicest thing I can think to say about Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons is that it isn’t so broken that I was prevented from finishing it.

Which is to say Gravity’s remake of Technos’ thoroughly mediocre 1988 arcade beat ’em up Double Dragon II: The Revenge is humiliatingly wretched, but still more or less playable.

Not that you’d want to waste even a minute of your leisure time or a penny of your your hard-earned money discovering this unassailable truth for yourself.

It is, in fact, just as much of a mess as the stunningly poorly written overview on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade website (screenshot above) suggests, leaving one to wonder whether anyone at Redmond even read the synopsis or played the game before giving either their stamp of approval.

In the (likely) event you haven’t played the original in a couple of decades, here’s a rundown of what happens in the game: A distractingly bosomy damsel in distress gets murdered by brutish thugs, causing a twin brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee — who are also her twin lovers — to go on a fist-fuelled rampage of revenge.

Granted, Gravity had little to work with, but the Korean game maker displays a dizzying ineptitude in storytelling nonetheless.

The opening tutorial is accompanied by a voice-over delivered by a non-accented actor speaking disconcertingly broken English. It almost feels like a lame, low-blow joke; the Westerner who purposely misuses English in order to make fun of Asians yet to learn the language’s rules and intricacies.

Things don’t get any better once the tale proper gets rolling.

Montages of bulging muscles, angry faces, and whimpering women in revealing clothing are meant to act as the narrative stitching between stages. Instead they come off as a nonsensical hodgepodge of amateurish drawings that could easily be mistaken for pictures ripped from the school notebook of a particularly geeky teen.

I don’t expect much in the way of story from my beat ’em ups, but playing a game the dramatic moments of which seem authored by a group of awkward, sex-obsessed high schoolers just doesn’t work for me.

Now, before getting into the nitty-gritty of what you spend your time doing in this game, you’ll want to remember that it’s a remake, not a port. That means it was built from scratch.

You’d think such a project might inspire those undertaking it to improve upon the quarter-century-old original — and not just by sprucing up the graphics a bit but by developing new controls and mechanics less likely to perturb players now accustomed to the much more accessible interfaces of modern-day games.

Nope.

All of the things that sucked about the original game and the beat ’em up genre in general back in 1988 have been faithfully recreated here.

Knocking enemies off the screen so you can’t reach them as they take their time recovering? Check. Foes who repeatedly kick you back down just as you’re getting up? Yup. Those overly long moments spent squatting in a vulnerable position while picking up knives and bricks? Perfectly captured. Stiff, unforgiving controls that make it difficult to change direction, much less efficiently move around the screen? Present — and just as maddening as they were back in the day.

On the bright side, though, I was able to rely on the age-old beat ’em up technique of performing a flying dropkick, running away, and doing it again and again to beat every single boss in the game.

I’m not kidding.

Gravity wasn’t content to simply duplicate all the annoying aspects of yesteryear’s beat ’em ups. They decided to introduce some fresh problems of their own.

Elbow attacks, for example, are thrown in apparently random directions — more often than not, it seemed to me, toward empty space. And at least the idiosyncrasies of old arcade games were predictable. Here I could never tell whether the game would let me break a string of punches and kicks I’d entered or if I’d be stuck watching helplessly as my Jimmy kept attacking thin air after knocking down an enemy even as other gangsters approached him from behind.

Myriad technical issues bung things up even more.

The game slows to a turtle-like crawl in later stages whenever more than a few moving elements are on screen at once, making precisely timed button combinations even more aggravating than they normally are (which is saying something).

And I’d love to give you a report on the bonus “survival” mode — which apparently involves beating up wave after wave of bad guys — but when I tried starting it up I was greeted with a black screen, my only escape from which was to quit the game.

Honestly, it’s almost as though the developers intended to play some cruel, experimental Andy Kaufman-ish joke on their audience by creating an experience so frustrating and un-fun that it makes players want to get up and physically assault the technology used to deliver it.

My favourite part of the game actually came after the credits when a local leader board popped up (we aren’t even granted the privilege of competitive online scoring) and a remix of the original Double Dragon theme began playing. It wasn’t a very good remix. But it was pretty much the only part of the game that didn’t make me grit my teeth in dissatisfaction.

It’s strange, though, how an abysmal game like Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons can make one a little less nitpicky when it comes to other works of interactive entertainment. After playing I decided to cleanse my palate by booting up another XBLA release, BattleBlock Theater, and I’ll be darned if The Behemoth’s fun but lightly flawed platformer didn’t seem downright godly by comparison.

Sometimes it takes a bad game to teach us just how good other games really are.